The Vortex at Mary Anne's Haunted House
by grammar conscious possum
Summary: While babysitting Mary Anne makes a terrible mistake that results in her being sucked into another dimension, with hilarious consequences. Back by popular demand!
1. Mary Anne's Spooky Experience With Kids

Chapter One: Mary Anne's Spooky Experience with Kids and a Vortex and Gets her Bra Snapped!

I pressed the doorbell and waited nervously. Suddenly Alan Grey appeared from the bushes and snapped my bra strap, then laughed in a high-pitched fashion and ran off.

"Calm blue ocean," I told myself, and smiled my least-nervous smile as the door opened for my admittance.

Not that the exterior of the house, number 666, Honted Hill, did much to reassure my jangling nerves. Oh sure, the stonework was nice, but I didn't much like the look of the gargoyles and the bell tower was frankly excessive. And that gardener dressed as a clown with spiked teeth didn't help matters. So I was glad to follow the butler into the cool gloomy interior.

"Hi there, Mary Anne, I'm Mrs. Von Sterbenhauser" said a voice from the living room. I went in. A tall, pale lady in a twinset and pearls was waiting. "Thank you so much for coming at such short notice. I don't know why our other babysitter had to cancel. Anyway, you're here now. These are my two children, Flossie and Billy Bob."

I turned as two kids came into the room.

"Gee, golly, gee whiz, it's our new babysitter, gosh!" said the boy, who looked about eight years old.

"Let's break out the cracklin's and deep-fried squirrel!" cried the little girl, who I guessed was about six years and three months, give or take a couple of days. I had a talent for knowing all about children. They loved me. I was after all ridiculously young to be babysitting.

The mom picked her way across the extensive graveyard in the backyard, and climbed into what looked suspiciously like a hearse. "Well I gotta go, I'm late for taxidermy club," she called. "The emergency numbers are in the secret passageway. Make sure the kids have juice and crackers for lunch. No squirrel till after dinner."

As the hearse lumbered away with Mrs. Von Sterbenhauaser in the back, the kids capered wildly around the living room. "Hey Billy Bob!" shrieked Flossie, "let's show the fresh meat – I mean, the babysitter, the house!"

Billy Bob took my hand. "Yeah, you gotta see my dad's laboratory," he said earnestly. "And the vaults! Oh, and we gotta vortex out that back that's, like, the coolest!"

While I allowed myself to be led down a series of dark passages, I mused to myself. There was something odd about these children and this house, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I shrugged it off. At least it was better than that family of naturists I had sat for in the hilarious adventures chronicled in #129, "Mary Anne Gets Naked".

As we turned a corner in the hallway, I heard a soft moaning coming from upstairs. "That sounds like Kristy in a car crash!" I said.

"Don't worry, it's just Tom the ghost," laughed Flossie.

At that point, a see-through old man floated down the stairs, hotly pursued by Harry Potter and Ron Weasley in a cameo appearance (A/N: when it's so long between Harry Potter books, they pay the bills by putting in cameos in other people's books. Duh.)

"Beware..." he moaned.

"Don't mind him," said Billy Bob anxiously. "He says that to everyone."

Flossie came to a halt in front of a set of large wrought-iron gates. They opened with a forbidding squeal, revealing a small room which was charmingly decorated with textured wall paper, a large vortex, and a couple of 1920s Tiffany lamps.

"Wow, nice vortex," I said politely.

Suddenly I realised that the children were looking at me kinda funny. Then I realised that there weren't the sweet innocent little tykes that I had originally thought. Mary Anne, I told myself, you've made an awfully big mistake. Their little grasping hands reached towards me and they cackled menacingly as I backed slowly away.

A slow dripping noise attracted my attention, and I looked upwards to see some sort of red, sticky, haemogoblin-rich liquid dripping from a crack in the ceiling. "Noo!" I howled, as I reached out for the wall, too late to save myself from slipping in the puddle and falling head first into the vortex.

(A/N: Ok, I don't know how vortexes work so I'll just make it up ok! Please R&R!)


	2. The Truth Hurts

Chapter Two: The truth hurts

Ok sorry I have been so long in writing this but I am lazy ok! Just read it already!

Finally I had escaped from that other dimension! Ok it only felt like I had been in there an hour but it was an our I would never forget. I stepped out of the vortex room, calling for the kids. As I walked down the hall, I looked into the living room and saw that all the Von Sterbenhausers were in there dead. They looked like they had been dead for a few years. At once, I realised instinctively that I had actually been gone for ten years, time passed differently in the other dimension.

"This is terrible!!" I thought madly. "What will the club say? Not only do I leave the children alone and go off gallivanting into some vortex, but then I come back inexcusably late to find them dead! Kristy will never forgive me! They'll have to put some sort of note of my record and nobody will want me to babysit their kids any more!" In a panic, I ran straight out of the house and just kept running.

At the bottome of Honted Hill I looked about me and was shocked. Everything was different. Cars were different shaped and I looked hideously tacky in my skin-tight hot pink leggings and my oversized blue tank top over the green T-shirt I had borrowed off Dawn.

Suddenly I bent over and threw up in the bushes. "What's wrong with me?" I thought? "Suddenly I'm desperate for some Mallowmars! And gravy! And oh my lord! My ankles are swelling up?! And I'm really emotional!" I burst out crying and ran madly out into the road, whereupon I was mown down by a priest on a bicycle.

(A/N: Sorry it's so short! I'm in the MTV generation and have a short attention span! LOL!)


	3. The Shocking Truth

A/N: My friend and I wrote this after first being introduced to FF, so please don't judge it too harshly. A lot of sugar was involved. Apologies for the eyeball-haemorraging lack of paragraphs in the first chapter, that should have been remedied long ago! Anyway, enjoy (if you're into this kind of thing)!

Chapter 3: The Shocking Truth

in hospital

I woke up all confused. Then I sat up like a bolt of lightning. "Omigosh!" I cried out. Where am I?"

I looked around me. I was in a white paper dress in a hospital bed. A nurse came over and looked at me kindly. "Are you feeling all right, dear?" she asked. "You've been unconscious for seven weeks. Father O'Shallery brought you in after he ran you over on his bike. He said you were raving about Mallomars and gravy and another dimension."

I burst into tears. I had to tell somebody. "I'm pregnant!" I shouted. A couple of old women looked over bemusedly from their beds.

The nurse was horrified. "You had SEX??" she gasped.

"No!" I cried. "I told you, I was in another dimension for ten years and I got pregnant by a mysterious force involving electricity."

She, like, totally bought it. "That's okay then. Where are your family, dear? Are they coming to pick you up?"

"Well," I mused, "I've been in another dimension for ten of your human years. So they're probably, like, dead of something. Could you call, say, Kristy Thomas, and ask her to pick me up?"

The nurse looked very pale. "I'm afraid I have some bad news for you," she said, gently but firmly.


	4. The BSC, Together At Last

Chapter 4: The BSC together at last...

I tried to absorb what the nurse had just told me. "Kristy...dying?" I asked. "Of tuberculosis? But don't you have antibiotics for that?"

"Shh" said the nurse sternly but gently. "We don't believe in that kind of stuff here. I'm afraid we're just going to let her die. It's better that way."

"How can you say that?" I raged.

"We need it for plot purposes," she explained, clearly but sternly. She led me up to a darkened private room where I could discern a wasted young woman sleeping in a narrow bed.

"Kristy," I moaned. "Oh, Kristy. Even after so many years you have those same eyes, that same hair, that same moustache. And yet everything is changed. Why, you're ten years older than me now. Isn't that, like, totally stale?"

There came a faint moan from the bed. I bowed my head. Then I was roused by a touch on my shoulder. I looked up to see the face of Bart Taylor looking at me.

"Mary Anne, is that you?" he asked tentatively? "But you disappeared, ten years ago! And you look like you haven't aged a day! Boy, the shock really did for your folks, though! Your dad wasted away and Sharon became a drug addict! And Dawn's taken to wearing combat pants, if you know what I mean."

"Oh, I figured something like that'd happen," I replied. The years hadn't treated Bart kindly. I could see the marks of his chronic gambling addiction. For one thing, he seemed to have fallen asleep on a roulette wheel, for he had the stripes printed on his face.

"Hey! Let's swing by and see em!" he shouted, cheerfully, disturbing the occupant of the bed.

"But don't you want to..." I began.

"Oh no," he said, dragging me along. "She'll hang around till the big reunion scene at the end. C'mon!


End file.
